Cynicism

Posted on Tuesday, 9 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I often come across comments in blogs, not only my own but also in those of others. The word cynical so often comes into my mind, as synonymous as the attitude of those who are jaded, generally mistrust the integrity or good motives of other people. The cynic, always assuming the worst, is systematically sceptical, pessimistic and scornful – and sees others as motivated by self-interest.

Where does this word cynicism come from? There is an article on Wikipedia which shows cynicism as a school of ancient Greek philosophy. The original meaning is surprisingly different from the way we use the word to describe a scathing and negative attitude to life. The Greek Cynics saw virtue in a simple and unconventional life, and they were actually quite close to the Stoics. It perhaps became a basis of monastic life in Christianity from about the fifth century.

They were indifferent to what others would say about them in their eccentricities. They had no shame. In the Roman world, cynicism was held in disdain by Cicero, who saw it as being opposed to modesty. I would quite easily see the hippies and other anti-socials of the 1960’s as modern cynics if we follow this idea of simplicity and the rejection of social convention. Some historians wonder if Jesus was influenced by cynicism, but most scholars doubt this and see the Jewish prophetic tradition as of much greater importance.

I wonder what gave rise to the change of meaning from the cynic being some kind of hippy to being someone who disbelieved in altruism. Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I have the impression that cynicism in this modern meaning of the word is one of our main obstacles to spiritual growth. In this morning’s Gospel, Christ says that if we do not become as a little child, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Children are innocent, trusting, and above all, capable of the sense of awe and wonder. Cynics are jaded, have lost innocence and the sense of the wonderful and transcendent. It is of no wonder that they only see evil, self-interest and a trap in everything.

Cynicism is the opposite of prophecy. It is intellectual sloth and paralyses the spirit. The only way out of it, like all spiritual sicknesses, is prayer and conversion. Those of us who suffer from cynicism need to rediscover natural and man-made beauty, and discover altruism where it is to be found. Perhaps we would ourselves become more altruistic, and therefore closer to God.

If we remain cynics, we will lose the Faith and our happiness.

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Mental Illness in the Clergy

Posted on Monday, 8 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Some of the blogs I have been looking at recently come up with incredibly lucid analyses about certain topics. Here is an independent priest on mental illness. Naturally, I read anything with a critical spirit and do not automatically endorse every word. I have no qualifications in psychology, but I have an enquiring mind and have read quite a lot about neuroses and real psychiatric pathologies like schizophrenia, personality disorders, bipolar disorders, depression and others. So, when such articles come up, they draw my attention.

This one looks into mental illness in the clergy, and this is nothing new. I have read allegations of some problems Pope Pius IX may have had in several perhaps not impartial sources. Fr Hans Bernard Hasler, who wrote Wie der Papste unfehlbar würde (how the Pope became infallible) in 1979, wrote about the possibility that Pius IX was mentally ill. Of course, it is utter folly to try to diagnose a man who has been dead for more than a hundred years! There is also a cultural difference. People were more grandiose in the nineteenth century without it being thought of as crazy.

I wrote about Saint Benedict Joseph Labre who was certainly more delusional than many of the cranks and crackpots who hang around traditionalist chapels looking for liturgical faults or something else they can attribute to the Great Conspiracy. But, let us not become waspish! It remains that the line between mental illness and holiness may be all too brief.

Again, in a world that seeks guarantees, do we have to subject all candidates for the priesthood to psychological tests? Perhaps it would be enough to send only those who seem to be “not quite right” – not just for screening, but that they might find the help they need. Mental illness comes in degrees, from serious personality disorders to depression and stress-related difficulties. Not all “crosses” people have to carry would disqualify a man from a priestly ministry.

Of course, our author fears the consequences to communities that don’t have the means to pay for proper psychological tests, and that having dangerous persons in the clergy would lead to legal problems engaging the civil liability of the bishop. On the other hand, some illnesses make the person in question dangerous to himself and the faithful, and necessitate professional treatment. Again, it is all up to an experienced and street-wise bishop to get it right.

We do well to inform ourselves as much as possible about these issues and concerns.

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Underground Church

Posted on Monday, 8 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

My attention has been drawn to a review of The Underground Church, a book the looks into Roman Catholic dissident movements. Religioscope is run by Dr Jean-François Mayer of Fribourg University and I usually find its articles balanced and non-polemical.

Something shines through this analysis – the fact that the Roman Catholic Church cannot accept certain orientations without totally changing it own character. However, something else shines through, which is the relative narrowness of criteria of orthodoxy and general correctness. Thus we find an institution that alienates both Hans Küng and Bishop Williamson at the extremes, and a lot of others in between. We are being told that the various reform movements are causing the generation of new churches and movements outside the official Church.

Perhaps the conservatives might be thrilled by such a development, but I have written before that an organisation that narrows the criteria of membership to a “razor edge” are condemned sooner or later to implode.

This point of view, though it states the obvious, is interesting and thought-provoking. The clerical sex abuse issue has fuelled the schismatic movement. To what extent it is happening in Europe, especially the German-speaking countries, as well as the USA, it is difficult to tell. Sooner or later, there will be schismatic movements on the left as well as the traditionalist world. Of course, when I use the words schism and schismatic, I strip them of their polemical and derogatory overtones.

We seem to have arrived at a time when reform-minded Catholics give up trying to stay within the official structures. However, these movements seem to be fading and giving way to apathy. This might work to the advantage of the conservatives or a fairly narrow middle-of-the-road institutional orthodoxy. Of course, the issues are the ordination of women, LGBT acceptance and the abolition of compulsory clerical celibacy. Some of these people may be drawn to the larger American independent jurisdictions or to conservative Old Catholic or Anglican jurisdictions if the question of married priests stands alone from those three issues.

I have yet to see evidence of large numbers of lay members in American independent churches, and I suspect this book, which I have not read, may be more speculative than empirical in its methodology.

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What’s in a Name?

Posted on Monday, 8 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

One thing that has driven a good proportion of Anglicans, both of the Canterbury Communion and the continuers, into the arms of Rome is the general feeling of tiredness of what has become termed “alphabet soup”. This is certainly the impression we get when we see long lists of jurisdictions each staking their own claim to some kind of organic legitimacy by virtue of “succession” from the parent body. The idea of becoming Roman Catholic is sometimes a quest for stability, doctrinal security and no longer having to justify oneself as belonging to a “legitimate” church. I notice that the bewildering lists of acronyms have their parallel in churches claiming a Reformed / Independent / Old Catholic tradition and also among those claiming an Eastern Orthodox patrimony.

As I have mentioned, there will be independent churches, both sacramental and non-sacramental for as long as some people prefer to set up small businesses rather than work as civil servants or in multinational corporations. Some need the security of the mainstream, and others need the independence and a more rugged kind of life. People will “go independent” for as long as mainstream churches seek to be all-controlling and are too heavy on conformity and uniformity. Also, it is amazing and heart-rending to see how “disposable” human beings are – like supermarket food packets one throws away each day. The sheer waste of the crumbs under the master’s table is probably the greatest scandal!

Independent Catholics and continuing Anglicans are always challenged when it is pointed out to them that you are Catholic if you are in formal canonical communion with the Pope and in the official Church, and Anglican if your bishop is invited to the Lambeth Conference. Otherwise, it is implied, you are just an impostor and worthless. You duty is to go back to your mainstream church of origin or become an atheist, or perhaps do something predictable by becoming a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna! Here, the difficulty is caused by the phenomenon of imitation – indeed this is what most annoys the mainstream churches.

Of course there are degrees. Some bishops will warn their flocks simply because there is a chapel on their patch and the priest or bishop looks something like his Roman Catholic counterpart – even when pains are taken to write a disclaimer “We are not in communion with Rome or the local RC diocese”. Cases of true misrepresentation are actually quite rare, but you do get cases of independent bishops representing themselves as Roman Catholic, hearing confessions in churches, taking part in ceremonies and even fiddling money in a few cases. Such behaviour discredits all. Sometimes, reactions go to the other extreme and question – for example – Anglican clergy dressing in Roman Catholic fashion. The practice of Anglo-Papalists in England aping Tridentine Catholicism, goes back as far as the late nineteenth century.

Uninformed inquirers are perplexed by the use of words like Anglican and Catholic, and I remember a posting on a continuing Anglican blog about this. Why call yourself Catholic if you are not in communion with Rome, simply because you distinguish attachment to that Church’s liturgical, spiritual and doctrinal patrimony whilst being in schism from its hierarchy and canonical discipline? The official Church would say that you can’t do that. It’s all or nothing.

I can thus understand why someone has come up with the notion of “independent sacramental” to describe the thousands of individuals and communities who are unchurched in mainstream terms, but who still seem to have a valid priesthood and practice their faith and religion independently. They may do some things Roman Catholics and Anglicans also do, but they affirm their own identity. Such a notion is made possible by theological speculations in the field of ecclesiology that place more emphasis on the Sacrament than the human and political institution.

I am all for these communities and individuals being respected in the exercise of their conscience, allowed freedom from constraint and allowed to continue within the limits of law and public order. That is the accepted notion of religious freedom as taught by most declarations of human rights over the past two hundred years and by the most recent Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church. Some will do work and survive, find stability, and others will die with their founders. That is the price of freedom.

I call myself Traditional Anglican Communion, because I am in possession of documents that attest that I am recognised to be a priest belonging to it. I identify with sacramental and credally orthodox Christianity. Here in France, I can’t go around calling myself a Catholic, and I only call myself an Anglican because I belong to an Anglican jurisdiction – or at least one that calls itself Anglican in a way that a significant number of people accepts. Should I be cast adrift from that, what could I call myself or the chapel where I say Mass? Not very much, I fear.

Unless one joins a mainstream Church with the consequences such a move would bring for any of us, we have to accept that security is an illusion, something we can only find in God and within ourselves. This is the beginning of understanding the Church of the future – made of spirit before being stone and mortar or political power.

With this reflection, I add a few reflections on a different way of living the priestly vocation. Christians are not persecuted in the western world unless they upset public order through blowing up abortion clinics or offending by hate speech (or what seems like such to the politically-correct brigade!) of one kind of another. If we are not involved in politics, we are left to our spiritual and liturgical life in peace, and we can always find ways to serve humanity even if we have to look like non-religious people to do it.

I have suffered scruples about not being a true parish priest with the idea that if I have not succeeded in getting a minimum of bums (butts on the other side of the pond!) on the pews of my chapel, I should give up and reconcile with Rome as a layman. In the mainstream church, a priest generally has a ministry or is a monk – but there are exceptions: priests employed in clerical tasks in diocesan curias and the Vatican bureaucracy, and, of course, teaching in schools, universities and seminaries. Such priests often say Mass on their own or with a single server in a church crypt, unless the time of the concelebrated Mass is convenient. We priests are conscious that our priesthood is not a personal possession but turned to serving the Church – and that is the source of my scruples when they haunt me.

Even saying Mass and Office alone is for the good of the world, and these services are public. I always make a point of leaving the door a little ajar unless the weather is bitterly cold, at least unlocked. The Mass is said even though there is no congregation, but I know many Anglicans will disagree. For them, if there are not a certain number of communicants (which the Prayer Book has never exactly defined), everything is packed up and no Eucharist is celebrated. The Orthodox also eschew celebrations of the Eucharist when there is no congregation. Roman canon law has become a little more relaxed. There should be at least a server or a lay person to make the responses, but a solitary Mass is allowed “for a good reason”. The priest’s piety and love of daily Mass is generally understood as being that “good reason” except perhaps for the most rigid purists.

The reason for all this is that the priestly ministry is not merely material and geared to people who are alive and in this world. The Church includes the departed in via and the Triumphant Church – the Communion of Saints. Spiritual writers often went on about the myriads of angels and saints assisting at each Mass of a priest – and that is why we still turn around and say Dominus vobiscum (or the equivalent in another language) to empty pews and the walls of the chapel. Whether we have visible or invisible congregations – or both – we priests are called to mediate Christ’s grace to the world. How that happens is a mystery. Some of us have not to leave the priesthood and live utter failure and spiritual suicide, but simply to let go of expectations of being “recognised” and honoured, and be given benefices and prestige. One step at a time is enough, and we have only to seek the Kingdom of God.

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Lay hands suddenly on no man

Posted on Sunday, 7 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Another request arrived by e-mail, asking me to comment on Fr Robert Hart’s article Yes it does matter. Initially, I was reticent as I have read a number of articles by this apparently quite erudite priest of the Anglican Catholic Church in the US, and who has been quite intemperate in his language and unmeasured in his polemics over the past few years. It remains that he has studied, comes from a family of interesting ideas and is appreciated.

I reverence his reverence, notably a vision of Anglicanism represented by the post-Reformation high-church movement from the late sixteenth century to the era of the Restoration under King Charles II. The vision is that of the Old High-Church, with which I have some sympathy if it is not too much of a single-issue. However, my own vision is wider between what was wholesome in medieval Catholicism to the aspirations of the ordinary people we meet every day in our time.

In a nutshell, Fr Hart is advocating high standards for ordination of new priests for the Church, any Church, and in his case, the Anglican Catholic Church. Having myself been a product of the Roman Catholic seminary system in its retro version, I have given a good deal of thought to the training of priests. I believe the good Father Hart is trying to compare the importance given to a priest validly celebrating the Sacraments simply because he has been ordained by a Bishop in Apostolic Succession with the education he needs to be capable of explaining the Scriptures and their meaning to the congregation. Indeed, the Word is on a par with the Sacrament in Christian worship. There he is right. The priest also needs to have solid moral and human qualities and be a devout Christian.

The issue really is one of standards of the clergy. I have been quite shocked to see the abysmal ignorance of some priests I have met, particularly in the “independent sacramental” world and in continuing Anglican jurisdictions. Amateur bungling prevails, and if it goes on for long enough, you get characters like in this country selling blessed roses on St Rita’s day, at twice the price if they are individually blessed! The bishop (validly ordained but pig-ignorant) I am thinking about lives  just down the road from where I live. I think of a story related at the Council of Trent when they were discussing liturgical abuses. In the early sixteenth century, a bishop visited a parish and was given a very grubby and old host for his Mass, and rightly complained about it to the priest. The priest replied by asking what was wrong with it, because he had been using it for the past fifteen years. He was consecrating the same host each time he celebrated Mass but never received Communion. That priest was doubtlessly “validly ordained”!

A priest needs to have the equivalent of a university degree in philosophy and theology, and then needs to have had years of experience of liturgical practice. Normally, a candidate for priestly training has already spent a significant time in a parish and has learned the functions of acolyte, thurifer and MC, and has watched what the priest and deacon do week after week. In the Roman Catholic Church, you went to a seminary and lived a “soft” monastic life for five to six years, sometimes longer. You learned to be a cleric and develop clerical manners, and polished it to a fine art. Like men in prison, one also learned to use intrigue and other means to manipulate others according to the power of your personality and lack of scruple. The seminary is a double-edged sword. Also the seminary is not designed for married candidates for the priesthood as are found in the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican traditions.

For me, the ideal is a young man who has been an altar server for years and / or who has sung in the choir, and shown commitment in his parish. He then goes to university and studies theology and acquires a critical spirit. Perhaps he gets a job for a few years and grows up as a person, then gets married and the first children are born. If the Church he belongs to has no financial resources, that’s it for our young man. He stays a layman with responsibility for his family, or the Church finds a way to have him as a kind of “apprentice” in the parish in view of ordination, taking the constraints (job, money, family commitments, etc.) into account.

I am for the abolition of seminaries for many reasons, but all for a theological education to a high standard and solid apprenticeship training in “priestcraft”. There is not only a question of the ability to celebrate liturgical services correctly, but also the art of preaching, pastoral work and simple management and communication skills. One doesn’t ask for a rocket scientist, just good professionalism.

The tendency in the Roman Catholic Church is “panic damage-control”, at least to an extent, so the clergy begins to become quite elitist and often confined to a particular social class. In any large institution, the tendency is to do nothing until it all gets into the newspapers and the blogs, then react to the other extreme. That, with the “small and pure” church model, should not be the aim, but there is a happy medium between that and “anything goes”. Criteria studies and other “guarantees” always allow the bad stuff to get through the net. Even in the very Tridentine style seminary where I went, a man who was later convicted for child sex abuse got through – and looked so pious and perfect – as did another who turned out to be a common thief. The only way is for the Church to be sufficiently family-like for the Bishop and parish priests to know their men, and to have known them for years. Bureaucracy does not replace human qualities and interactions.

In this last paragraph, I have already addressed Fr Hart’s criticism of the Roman Catholic Church on account of the sex abuse scandal. You get bad clergy in all churches, bad teachers, bad policemen, doctors, everything. I don’t pretend to know why bad men are bad or what could be done to prevent them getting through the system. Psychopaths and sociopaths, by their being individuals without scruple or conscience, are artists at manipulation and pretending to be what they are not. I believe it is unfair to single out the Roman Catholic Church when evil has happened in every single religious and secular organisation.

Fr Hart, in his article, made the point that the Roman system of selecting and training clergy needed to be reformed. In that, we would be agreed, and so are many others including the so-called “liberals”. Like the liberals, I advocate the dismantling of the “clerical caste”, notably through the abolition of compulsory celibacy, except of course for those who are called to a monastic life. Of course, the same can be said for any elite system in any walk of life where cronyism and nepotism are the rule. My own argument revolves around the dismantling of large impersonal structures and bureaucracy and its decentralisation to produce family-like local communities where people know each other. There is no substitute for intuition and knowing a person. That isn’t infallible either to weed out evil, but more effective.

Slamming the Roman Catholic Church in these questions is a red herring, even if the RC Church has the biggest and most impersonal bureaucracy. The Church of England has the same problem of evil priests, though on a smaller scale. The problem isn’t going to be solved by tightening the screws even tighter, unless you stop ordaining priests altogether and decide to have a purely lay Church – and then such a thing couldn’t be controlled! There is no one simple solution other than decentralisation and more human influence.

The good padre gives his own church a slap on the back. Perhaps their agreements between bishops of various continuing churches have done a considerable amount of good to stop the infighting. I have yet to hear of good practical resolutions for the training of future priests, and perhaps with some nice reports of bright university graduates doing their apprenticeship in a parish.

Obviously, for many Americans, no other place exists in the world and American notions of evangelism (marketing and the commercial advertising model as the “mega churches” use) work everywhere. They don’t. Even in America as the “empire” crumbles as it runs out of money, people’s relationship with God and religion is changing. It is all well and good to dream of a dynamic and spiritual church of the future. But, why is it not here already?

Perhaps the whole notion of the “mainstream” church and its imitations is what is wrong. We cannot relate to institutions and bureaucracy, but we can relate to family and friends, to spiritual kindred. And that is what is important. Once there is the cement of friendship that is a true icon of God’s love, then one can consider the roles of the Word and the Sacrament in the liturgy and the ministry of those who are ordained priests. Continuing Anglican churches and independent Catholic communities are small and have this potential, once the red herring of replicating what we left has been consigned to history.

Then on that smaller and personal scale, we might find we already have what we have been coveting – right under our nose!

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The King James Bible

Posted on Saturday, 6 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I received another e-mail today with this request:

A nice piece on the history and influence of the King James Bible of 1611? (…) The AV just celebrated its 400th anniversary which went surprisingly unnoticed in the media.

Well, my biblical studies at Fribourg made scant reference to the King James Bible, though I remember taking Old Testament oral examinations with Father Dominique Barthélemy OP, one of the greatest biblical scholars of the twentieth century and a real personality at the Biblical School of Jerusalem. I found with this man a great love of the Scriptures and a deep theological vision founded on the Wisdom literature, the Messianic Prophecies and the entire history of God’s People. He would talk to me of his love of the Great Bible and Anglican biblical scholarship, citing Lightfoot in particular.

For the history of the Bible in English and the King James Bible in particular, I refer you to a good general introduction at Authorized King James Version. This Wikipedia article has links at the bottom of the page for a number of excellent searchable resources. So, I have nothing to add in terms of scholarship on this subject. However, I can offer a couple of general reflections.

With some Anglicans, the King James Bible tends to be something of a single-issue or hobby horse. It is certainly a beautiful translation and a monument of English writing. That is undoubted. Many quaint expressions have found their way into English culture, and this influence cannot be denied. When I quote from the Bible, I always quote from the King James and from the Prayer Book Psalter, which is an earlier translation, attributed to Miles Coverdale.

There are certainly better translations from the original Greek texts. I subscribe to the school of thought that considers the Septuagint (in Greek) as a more ancient and authentic version of the Old Testament than the later Hebrew versions in use in the Jewish community. Nonetheless, scholars have always compared the two versions. The Latin Vulgate was translated from the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament, and about the finest English translation of the Vulgate is the Roman Catholic Douai-Rheims version. But, that translation was from the Latin rather than directly from the Greek. For accuracy of rendering of the Hebrew and Greek texts, probably some of the more modern Bibles are preferable for study, like for example the Jerusalem Bible.

I do believe in continuing to use the King James Bible for liturgical Scripture readings except the Epistles and Gospels contained in the Prayer Book for the Eucharist (more or less the Sarum lectionary) and taken from the earlier English bibles.

That being said, my usual liturgical fare is the Sarum missal in Latin and the Monastic Breviary in the same language, so, for me, the King James Bible is of relative value in that context. Like Latin, classical English has become by usage a liturgical language and forms strong cultural attachments. That aspect should never be underestimated. It is very bad pastoral practice to alienate people from their culture!

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Ausculta O Fili

Posted on Saturday, 6 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

As a result of my posting asking for new ideas and fresh blood, I received an e-mail this morning expressing a need for more spiritual content and for me to expand on the Benedictine theme.

I therefore begin this posting with the first three words in Latin of the prologue of the immortal Rule of St Benedict.

Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away.

To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King.

In the first place, beg of him by most earnest prayer, that he perfect whatever good thou dost begin, in order that he who hath been pleased to count us in the number of his children, need never be grieved at our evil deeds. For we ought at all times so to serve Him with the good things which he hath given us, that he may not, like an angry father, disinherit his children, nor, like a dread lord, enraged at our evil deeds, hand us over to everlasting punishment as most wicked servants, who would not follow him to glory.

Many of us who are not monks or even oblates will find find great inspiration in a loose reading of the Rule, capable of understanding such notions as analogy, allegory and poetry.

I stayed for just over six months at the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame de Triors in southern France from the end of 1996 until July 1997. It is a daughter house of Fontgombault, which was founded in an old reacquired abbey in 1948 by the Abbey of Solesmes. Those abbeys have anything from thirty to sixty choir monks and lay brothers, and new houses have been founded, including Clear Creek in the United States. Their Gregorian chant is sublime and the liturgy is very traditional and in Latin. I was not a postulant, but simply an unchurched deacon, a working guest.

As I studied the Rule with the Abbot, in order to understand monastic life better and for it to influence my own spiritual life, I was struck and continue to be haunted by Dom Delatte’s commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict:

“The absence of distractions and diversion entirely delivers us to our suffering. The suffering of contemplatives is like Purgatory: the fire penetrates to the marrow, to the most intimate fibres; it is like food being cooked slowly, the lid on the pot, the steam transforming the food. All the movements become painful, like a man who has had his skin stripped away…”

It sounds a bit like a man subjected to torture in a totalitarian regime. As the Abbot admitted to me, monastic life is totalitarian and actually corresponds with all the criteria civil society applies to define a cult like the Scientologists or the Mormons. What an indictment!

On the other hand, the Gospel is radical. He who seeks his soul will lose it and he who gives up everything will be rewarded a hundredfold. That is radical Christianity for you! The most difficult thing is letting go and disciplining the imagination. Every day is the same with only the variations of the seasons. Taste for beauty is replaced by silence, obedience and contemplation. I wrote a few years ago – it must have been based on something I read in Thomas Merton:

The dull monotony of monastic life was relieved by the smallest miracles of nature. It is the admiration of a prisoner as he sees a single leaf emerge from its bud beyond the bars of his confinement, and when the first songbird alights on the window ledge.

How was it possible to suffer by the liturgy I had always loved? The length of Matins and Lauds became a heavy burden, as it doubtless does for young novices who enter the cloister. Indeed the sickness of acedia has its devastating effect on the contemplative. This is where a monastic vocation is made or broken. As Dom Delatte had written, the skin is pulled away as the soul is cooked in its own Purgatory. However, something of my own personality and self-love remained, as indeed was intended, for I had never entered the cloister, nor was it intended to me even to consider a monastic vocation.

The downside of the French abbey is also the feeling of dourness, almost a kind of military spirit of soldiers in their barracks. Individuality is stripped away as the monk lives an anticipation of heaven. Perhaps the disembodied soul no longer has any individuality or personality, but simply becomes part of a universal consciousness, absorbed into the essence of God. It is something I often wonder in spite of evidence to suggest that the souls of the deceased continue to be what they were in life except for no longer having a body.

In spite of monastic life being a lifetime of pain and labour, there must be some consolation in it. I was never ready for such a total letting go, and most priests and lay folk do not have the monastic vocation. In Orthodox monasticism, there are several levels of commitment from the Rasophore to the hermit living the most appalling austerities. In the Benedictine monastery, you have the regular oblate, the lay brother, the choir monk and the hermit.

In six months, you can really find out what it is all about, especially with the detachment of someone who will never enter the community. I wrote yesterday about the Sarabite, and St Benedict also wrote about the Gyrovagus, the wandering pique-assiette or parasite who went from house to house. These are hard words which seem to contradict the legitimate levels of religious commitment. St Benedict Joseph Labre was a “fool for God”, probably mentally ill and a vagrant, but yet has been canonised by the Church. Monks have lived in twos and threes, and their life is legitimate, upright and edifying. I have known of a few very small monastic communities, even though the norm at least in the French Congregation is starting a new house with no less than fifteen monks. I think the categories of sarabite and vagrant need to be studied carefully and well understood, so that judgemental fingers are not unjustly pointed.

I think it is possible to live a Benedictine-inspired life without being a monk, living in the world. They have always had secular oblates who don’t live in community or wear the habit. Many things about the monastic way have remained, though I lack their disciplined precision and routine that enables them to assume incredible workloads. The essentials are prayer and work, giving highest priority to the Divine Office and making one’s entire existence into ceaseless prayer. The ideal is simple, and the most difficult to attain!

I think the Benedictine ideal for those who are not monks needs to be developed and made into a source of strength for our life in the wilderness. Like the songbird and the first leaf of spring, we need to treasure every opportunity for doing a Christ-like deed to another person, and therefore justifying our existence as priests or simple Christian believers in a world where secular organisations have taken over philanthropy and charity. The cloister can take many forms. Mine is the sea!

Spiritual growth? I’m hardly a holy man, but there are gems to be found in Thomas Merton, Dom Delatte and Dom Marmion among so many others. Go to the true masters – and give ear, hearken to their wisdom!

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Analysis of the Independents

Posted on Saturday, 6 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

This subject has filled my mind for some days now, as it has for more than thirty years. To a young man, it represents a world of exotic fantasy for the curious mind, perhaps a little mocking humour like seeing a freak show or mentally ill people. One has only to think of the notoriety of the Bedlam lunatic asylum in the so-called Age of Reason immortalised by Boris Karloff in a film from the 1940’s!

Then the compassionate mind asks why. Why do some men not go through the ordination procedures in the mainstream churches and go on a way that is generally a dead end? In was in about 1982 that a friend gave me my copy of Peter Anson’s Bishops at Large. It was truly a freak show of domestic patriarchs and the wildest craziness. This book features someone I knew in London, who attended Evensong at St Augustine’s Queens Gate where I had an organist job playing for Evensong. This was William H. Turner who turned out to be a bishop, and was coming along to our Anglican service for a little friendship and a sense of Christian fellowship. He was a jolly fellow, dead now, but who left a pleasant memory.

Most of my own experience has been somewhere between mainstream and ‘vagante’. Of course, my earlier church upbringing was Establishment Anglicanism, and then I was attracted to high-church eccentricity and then to traditionalist expressions – since the discourse seemed cogent and compelling. I had no taste for 1970’s altars facing the people and musical tastes that would replace the organ and the choir. Being something of an ‘anarchist’ in my early teens would also predispose me to take an interest in eccentricity and personal expressions.

As the Internet arrived, even though I had the privilege of a university education and an excellent library, I was opened to a whole new world. With my disillusionment with traditionalist Catholicism and the idea of becoming Western Orthodox (its practical realisation being at the time unavailable outside the USA), I began to explore other works, especially those written by those who were themselves episcopi vagantes. I was quite put off by the waspish language of Anson and the snotty sneer of Brandreth, and needed another point of view.

So it appears things are changing as men grow up and become more realistic. They see how silly it is to dress up to the nines just to entertain themselves, and the fact the modern world is hostile enough to the mainstream Churches, let alone to these little men whom no one else understands.

The real reason appears to me to be the exclusivism of the mainstream churches and the ever-tightening criteria and procedures for selecting suitable candidates for the priesthood – and then the control exercised over those who are ordained. It is a particularly modern phenomenon essentially going back to the anti-Modernist purge of the late nineteenth century, the reaction against Vatican I and its entire ethos and teaching, and by way of exception the story of Utrecht in the early eighteenth century. As ‘orthodoxy’ tightens the screws, there are dissidents. And this is happening right now. I shudder to think what is about to happen in Austria in a short time, unless it will be a damp squib and the ‘progressive’ dissidents simply cease to practice their faith or go to church – leaving the remaining parishes to the conservative hard-core.

As conservatism and liberalism polarise like twentieth-century politics, increasing numbers of people have had enough and are alienated. They switch off, wanting nothing to do with something that is diametrically opposed to what Christianity is supposed to stand for. That is what is behind independent sacramental Christianity, whether modelled on liturgical traditionalism, radical inclusivism or mysticism and gnosticism. It is the instinct that drives someone to leave a western country to live on a little island out in the middle of the Pacific!

Broadly speaking, there are several tendencies after the folie de grandeur phase. There are quite a few manifestations of esoterism and gnosticism, the most successful of which has been the Liberal Catholic Church – which has fragmented. Some seekers are attracted to a mystical experience, and this fact brings lay people to those communities.

I am intrigued to find the notion of institutionalists. These are bishops and their communities who emphasise jurisdiction and the creation of permanent institutions. They adopt the canonical concepts and methods of the mainstream churches, Roman Catholicism in particular. This is understandable, if you go along with the notion of man being a social animal and needing structures and laws. The problem of this is where the buck stops. In the Roman Catholic Church, it is the Pope who is at the top of a very large structure. In a “non-canonical” church, the structure is small and the prelate can become painfully aware that he has no authority over him. They try to achieve critical mass by concordats of intercommunion and ecumenical initiatives, and even try to get in with the Union of Utrecht and the Orthodox. Sometimes they succeed and negotiate conditions for the amount of freedom they need in tension against their newly-acquired brand legitimacy.

And then we have the replicators and continuers. They replicate the mainstream church they left, but an archaic version of it. Continuing Roman Catholics refer to the Church before Vatican II, and Continuing Anglicans refer to a period when they still had the Prayer Book and no women clergy. Conversely, there are also replicators for whom the mainstream isn’t liberal enough. They use the modern Roman liturgy, ordain women and welcome the LGBT agenda. There is a strong collusion between those movements issuing from Anglicanism and from Roman Catholicism and even from Eastern Orthodoxy. I have always been unable to compartmentalise my mind on this question, and therefore to understand the fact that many Anglicans converting to Roman Catholicism refuse to admit the possibility of encountering some of the very same problems they fled when they left the Anglican establishment. I have been amazed at some of the stuff I have read in the blogs over the past four years or so.

There is another category, some thing more or less corresponding with the post-Evangelical and post-Fundamentalist “emergent” tendency in the Protestant world. This paradigm is selectively exploited by some sacramental Christian clergy and laity. They are sometimes called free Catholics, motivated by a combination of sacramentalism and congregationalist ecclesiology. They open the criteria for allowing individuals to become ordained priests with the idea that the Church is less of a clerical institution than a presence in the secular world. Different values and conceptions give rise to new approaches. Much of the Protestant emergent movement is perceived as unworkable or unacceptable for other reasons, but there are fundamental intuitions in this response given to a world that is increasingly hostile or indifferent to Christianity, or at least the caricatures conveyed by mainstream churches. I find I am beginning to like this approach, even though I have no way of knowing whether it is not yet another dead end. But, I do say that if Christianity has to be based on the exclusive sect model and bigotry, then I would have to reject Christianity or find a way to reconnect to a more authentic version of it.

How do they go about it? Thousands of ways probably, but small family-like communities and friendship seem to be the key – as an alternative to legalism, exclusion, institutionalism and bigotry. If we have to imitate what we left, why leave it in the first place? These are fundamental questions. Another good thing about this approach is that they are rid of the accusation coming from the mainstream churches – They are copying us and deceiving our faithful. Whether we originally hail from an Anglican or Catholic background, this might be a way that could find fertile ground and adapt to the post-modern world in order to maintain the leaven of Christ’s spiritual presence.

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Aelred of Rievaulx and Friendship

Posted on Friday, 5 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

Aelred of Rievaulx may be abusively adopted by some quarters representing the LGBT agenda, but his works clearly disapprove of sex outside marriage and he condemned “unnatural relations” as a rejection of charity and the law of God. He lived in the twelfth century and he was a Cistercian abbot, leading a large community of monks strictly observing the Rule of St Benedict.

His life can be easily found in books and on the internet, so I see no point in copying those resources here. The purpose of this article is to introduce a text which made a big difference to me as a seminarian and gave me a critical attitude to some of the less fortunate aspects of Catholic spirituality and clerical discipline. Other than his historical works, he wrote two books, both dealing with love, the love of God and love between human beings, are the Speculum caritatis – The Mirror of Charity, allegedly written at the request of Bernard of Clairvaux, and De spiritali amicitia – On Spiritual Friendship.

I therefore offer this pdf version of De spiritali amicitia which you can download here. This work, written in Latin and translated into English, resembles the style of Plato’s Dialogues and essentially gives a Christian perspective to Cicero’s writings on friendship. There has always been a fear of “particular friendships” in monasteries, religious houses and seminaries, and those fears are often founded when they lead to unhealthy cliques and homosexual acts. This book is a real treasure and is spiritually and intellectually nourishing, and can be a great help in our married life, discerning our friendships and faux amis and resolving conflicts at work. It isn’t just for monks!

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Kind Words from an Army Chaplain

Posted on Friday, 5 October, 2012 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I received an e-mail today from an English army chaplain who has been ministering in one of the hell-holes of this world. He must be a brave man!

He shared with me many of his concerns and personal suffering, and the point of my mentioning it at all is that he said he appreciated my New Goliards blog as a “good raft” for priests, the content of which is now on this blog.

Please do continue to write and offer us your sane and encouraging pieces.

He asked me for prayers for the British soldiers he has been serving in a part of the world where they truly risk their lives. I ask all of your readers also for your prayers for them.

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